by: Lauren Williamson

In October, Facebook launched a new feature called Custom Audiences, which allows you to target Facebook ads directly to people on your email list (you can also target users via phone numbers or Facebook user ID’s if you have that information). This gives marketers a lot of different opportunities to hone in on certain segments of their audience such as prospective customers, frequent customers, customers in a certain geographic location, and more. You can also use this list to target individuals on your email list who have not yet Liked your Facebook Page, which is what we did in a recent campaign.

We wanted to test the ability of this feature to drive new Likes for one of our clients, the Vincent van Gogh Gallery. They are the #1 Van Gogh site on the web and have a very active Facebook Page with nearly 30,000 Likes. They wanted to continue to grow their Facebook audience, but wanted to make sure these new users were highly targeted to maximize the chance that they will engage with their brand on Facebook. To do this, we used the opt-in email list that the Gallery already had, uploaded it to Facebook with the Power Editor tool, and let Facebook match the email addresses on the list to Facebook accounts. To download the Power Editor, visit your Ad Manager in Facebook.

Once we uploaded the list into Power Editor, we found that of the people on their email list, 42% had a Facebook account. But we did not want to include users who had already Liked their Page, so we chose to target only people not currently connected to the Vincent van Gogh Gallery Facebook Page. Only 7% had already Liked the page, so we had quite a large number of individuals left to target.

We created two different types of ads, ads with text about the Vincent van Gogh Gallery and a call-to-action for users to Like the Page and ads that pulled the most recent post from their Page.

We launched the ads with the budget suggested by Facebook, and after the first week, 10% of all users we targeted had Liked the Page. Average cost per Like ended up being less than $0.60 a relatively low expense for the ability to reach such a targeted audience.

We also found that the ads pulling the most recent post from their Page had a 33% higher CTR than the next highest performing basic text ad; however, several of the basic text ads resulted in more Likes than the ad pulling from the most recent post.

The whole set-up (including downloading the Power Editor tool) only took about an hour. Ongoing monitoring throughout the week was quick and easy, resulting in a quick and inexpensive campaign to grow their audience. This type of campaign will continue to be part of the ongoing PPC strategy for the Vincent van Gogh Gallery; as their email list continues to grow, we can target those new members and continue testing what types of ads get the best response. If you have an email list, this is definitely a worthwhile (and did I mention quick?) method to grow your Facebook audience. Get creative with this new tool – try targeting leads, upselling current customers, targeting friends of customers, encouraging newsletter signups or promoting upcoming events!